Posted by Spooner | 0 Comments

The Future of Tanking in Patch 3.2

So Ghostcrawler has gone and posted more about how block, avoidance, and threat are going to be changed in patch 3.2. Honestly I got the main concept they were talking about and don’t really see why it is that there needs to be a dissertation on tanking every week. We already know that dodge is better than parry (at this time) but that in itself is a problem since bears (druid tanks) cannot parry, warriors and paladins can use it marginally, and death knights rely heavily on it.

Block is something only paladins and warriors worry about but its not as strong or helpful as dodge/parry and that’s why its being buffed considerably in the next patch. The side-effect we all wanted but won’t get anymore, was the added DPS that abilities like shield slam and shield of righteousness would generate (that means more threat too for PvE).

Just thinking about it hurts my head so I’m going to stop here.

Avoidance (namely parry and dodge)
The main goal of the change was to make parry not so much less attractive than dodge as an avoidance stat. Since tank avoidance is so high already, we wanted to do that by nerfing dodge a little, not by buffing parry.

This hurts druids slightly more than other tanks, but the emphasis is on “slightly.” This is not the big druid nerf that some forum posters have predicted. We will continue to evaluate tank survivability and threat generation based on PTR tests with “Patchwerk” to decide if druids need to be nerfed or DKs buffed or look at Prot warrior dps or anything else.

This is also not the big avoidance “come to Naaru” that some posters predicted. Overall, we think avoidance is too high and the game would work better with lower tank avoidance, but suddenly dropping everyone’s avoidance by 20 or 30% would be a very big change with many ramifications for healing and gear among other things. It would also feel like a big nerf to the many players who didn’t understand why it would be better for the game in the long term. But I still expect it is coming at some point. (Source)

More on Block
I feel like we’ve been pretty candid about its future. You can probably find my previous comments relatively easily. We think block needs to mitigate much more incoming damage per hit, but to make that change we would also need to lower tank avoidance across the board and prevent every hit from being blocked (especially in situations with more than one target beating on you). To make Prot tanking more interesting, we have allowed block to become too much of a dps stat. In retrospect, we’d rather it remained a mitigation stat and that Strength was pushed up as the big warrior and paladin dps stat.

You shouldn’t overly worry about outscaling content. We said from the beginning that there would be three major patches to Wrath of the Lich King. We aren’t setting up a system that is going to remain on autopilot for 10 more tiers of content without our intervention. It’s totally valid for players to worry about scaling, and all things considered, we’d rather have mechanics that scale well. But if those scaling problems aren’t going to manifest themselves until you have item level 500 items, then you’re worried prematurely.

We would like to get Prot warriors into PvP in a legitimate way, but our first priority is making sure every class has at least one viable PvP spec first. By “legitimate” I do NOT mean that you sometimes can do a 19K Shield Slam when all the stars align. That’s not acceptable even if it is rare. Also consider that tanks do have a legit role acting like actual tanks when running flags or tanking AV-style NPCs. That may not be enough of a role, but I did want to point out that emphasizing BGs more and Arenas less also helps to carve out a niche for PvP tanks.

I know there are plenty of Prot warriors out there who couldn’t care less about PvP. Sorry. We have to.

We want Prot warriors to do decent damage in PvE. We don’t want them to do as good damage as actual dps specs — there needs to be a trade-off for such high survivability. This means we need threat multipliers or you won’t be able to actually hold aggro. It’s okay if Shield Slam can make big (yet not absurd) numbers, since you don’t Shield Slam all that much. That’s fun. As I said above though, it would probably work better if Shield Slam hit hard because your Strength was high, not because you built a gimmicky set.

The problem, GC, is that this doesn’t scale between 10s and 25s. Damage in 25s is considerably higher than 10s, but amount of damage blocked is not. If block becomes powerful, it could easily dominate 10s and still be weak in 25s.
If only there was a mathematical operation we could perform that would scale the amount blocked to the size of the hit. (Source)

Threat generation
There has been a lot of discussion about +threat moves being a crutch and tanks should just be able to hold aggro based on their dps. But that implies that your dps is as high or higher than a class or spec who can only dps. There will probably be +threat added to stances and abilities for the foreseeable future. That does not mean your dps needs to be 10% of a dps raid member. (Source)

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Posted by Spooner | 2 Comments

Tanking gimmick fights, block, and avoidance problems.

So it’s safe to say that designing boss encounters that favor one tank over another dramatically is bad for the game. Why I see so much of it in Wrath confuses the shit out of me but that’s blizzard for you. Anyway, I’m calling bullshit in general on a lot of the tanking issues right now. Block is almost a completely garbage stat at the moment since just about every boss in Ulduar requires you to have many cooldowns to blow through and a lot of health. Block pretty much feels like random armor at this point, and it’s just as lackluster.

The goal they set down was that any class could main tank, ultimately they’ve succeeded but there’s still a massive wall most main tanks will hit and unless you have a solid fallback, you’re done. I broke up the large wall of text below for you folks but you can always find it here, and here.

Even if you could somehow make certain that paladins were the best at some kind of bosses (so that they didn’t just become the trash tank), you are then tied to make sure every raid has a few of those types of bosses. Ulduar becomes 3 warriors bosses, 3 paladin bosses, 4 druid bosses, 4 DK bosses. If one of those bosses is perceived as more difficult, more necessary or rewarding of better loot, then the sense of inequity still exists.

Furthermore, we don’t want every guild to have to keep 4 good tanks on their permanent roster and just slide them in for the right fight. While dual-spec makes that slightly easier than before, we still don’t think it’s fair to demand every guild keep someone on hand who can spec and gear as a Feral druid or Prot paladin.

We’re fine with certain tanks having a slight advantage on some fights, because we recognize that’s probably inevitable as long as the abilities are different. This is going to always be trickier for the hard modes, but again the goal is that you can have any class of tank as your main tanks.

So with that out of the way, what the fuck is up with block? It’s a garbage stat on gear that I would rather have HP stacked. I can’t even say much for dodge and parry either as pure avoidance is very random and you’ll end up realistically being annihilated if one of those hits gets through the RNG.

Think about it this way.

Avoidance is good because it removes a lot of damage. Avoidance is bad because it is unpredictable. If you stack too much avoidance, you are likely to give your healers coronaries.

Mitigation (armor and straight damage reduction) is good because it’s consistent. As you all point out, you can start to learn how much a blow will actually do to you. Mitigation is bad, from a player’s perspective, because it can’t save you. If you have 10 health and dodge, you might live. If you have 10 health and hope your armor will save you… well, it won’t. You become the dreaded mana sponge because you are never avoiding damage completely.

Mitigation also has a risk from a design-perspective that when fights get too predictable they become too easy and unexciting. Imagine a tank with 75% damage reduction and no avoidance. You could calculate from the moment of the first attack whether you will survive the encounter. Heck, you might be able to not even heal the tank and know you’ll survive depending on the specific abilities used by the boss.

Block as a mechanic is somewhere between avoidance and mitigation. Ideally it removes a fair amount of damage (vs. all damage) reasonably often (vs. rarely). If block is up 100% of the time it just becomes armor that you improve through a different stat. We have let block chances creep up frankly because the amount blocked is pretty trivial when bosses are hitting for 40% of your health pool every swing. If this still strikes you as too RNG, imagine abilities like Shield Block and Holy Shield that could guarantee 100% chance to block for a short period of time.

We don’t think block is cutting it as a mechanic, but the direction we are likely to take it is probably more of a change than you are considering.

We also don’t think it’s necessary that every tank rely on avoidance, block and mitigation in equal amounts. They can’t get too far apart or someone will come to dominate for certain encounters, but we don’t think the tanks need to be completely homogenized to get what we want either.

If (to make up numbers) the DK and druid get hit for 20K every swing that hits, but the warrior and paladin get hit for 24K half the time and 16K half the time, then that seems like it would work. When the boss emoted that his big hit was coming, you could make sure you had your cooldown ready to guarantee a block.

I agree that nobody wants to be the tank that avoids, avoids, avoids and then gets hit for 4X normal damage. (Then again, part of the problem we had with DKs last patch was their avoidance was just too high.) In my example, the shield-using tanks get hit for 4K more damage 50% of the time. If you’re calling that “spike damage” and saying it’s unacceptable, then I’m afraid nothing can be done to salvage differences among the tank classes.

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